Seeing with Different Eyes - Cosmology and Divination

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Chapter Two
knowledge of illusory future events, because “future” (in the sense of
prognosis) is equated here with the eternal reality (in the sense of gnosis,
the Sufi ma’rifah) of the divine principles. Thus, as Gregory Shaw
emphasises, the phenomena of mantike are turned into the exempla of
theurgy which transcends the faculty of human discursive reasoning
altogether. 28 Iamblichus says:
Divine mantike alone unites us with the gods, for it genuinely gives us a
share of the divine life, has a share in prognosis and divine intuitions, and
makes us truly divine. It truly bestows the Good on us, because the most
blessed intuition of the Gods is filled with all the good things. 29
This theurgic divination, which is equated with the ascent to the
divine realm, must not be viewed as a Neoplatonic addition to the
Chaldean (or Assyrian) material related to the theologies of Adad, Ashur
and Ishtar, but as the central esoteric motif of the Mesopotamian apkallu
(or, strictly speaking, of the apilu and raggimu) tradition, whose symbols
are reflected in different myths and rituals. When God Himself speaks
through his receptacle, the transformed human being—as if “annihilated”
in the descent of the divine fire—may proclaim like Hussayn ibn Mansur
al-Hallaj: Ana’l-haqq, “I am Truth”, in the sense “I am God”. Similarly,
Ashur, “the only God” and “the sum total of gods”, says:
Myself, Ashur, I have heard your complaint, and I descended, in all
majesty, from my Great Door of Heaven… I am Ashur, the lord of the
gods, am I. 30
The so-called Enoch literature of Jewish mysticism derives directly
from the Assyrian and Babylonian hieratic customs of descent and ascent
to the stars. The image of Enoch in Judaism was modified during the
Persian period (after the fall of the Chaldean Empire) by certain educated
Jews, in order to establish in Israel a body of new “scientific” doctrines
about the working of the cosmos. These presented Enoch as the patron of
the new science, allegedly revealed to him by angels, and as the leading
figure of the new apocalyptic mysticism which was added to its
framework. This radical revaluation of the cosmos is described as “cosmic
paranoia” by Jonathan Smith, since the popular imagination was strongly
affected by the “scientific truths”, especially those related to the
emergence of “scientific” astrology: “to ascend to another world of
freedom and openness becomes the aim of Hellenistic man and the chief
concern of his religion.” 31 At the same time, the realm of genesis was
turned into a place of mythical darkness—an inevitable consequence of the